


Life

by PastaBucket



Category: Rockman | Mega Man - All Media Types
Genre: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Programming, Development, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-03
Updated: 2020-03-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:07:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22542238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PastaBucket/pseuds/PastaBucket
Summary: Dr. Wright builds Roll.
Relationships: Dr. Light (Rockman) & Roll (Rockman)
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've always known Thomas Light as Dr. Wright, so that's what I'mma call him.

Wright finished tightening the final nut on the little drone, and wiped his brow.  
"This should work.", he said to himself.  
Turning it on, the machine jumped to life. The main servo motor drove the swivel in its neckstem, that in turn moved its mounted sensors. This allowed it to sweep of its surroundings as part of its idle state, while producing little mechanical chirps.  
"Like clockwork.", Dr. Wright remarked. "You are finished, little buddy. Time for you to go out and play with the others."  
With some effort he lifted the sentry down to the ground, and watched it as it made its way out of the workshed on its own accord.  
"Now you remember to behave and play nice, just like you're programmed to."

We turned his attention back to the project next to where the drone had been. It was a big project - a rubber sheet, molded into the shape of a human face. He grabbed the connected keypad, and with the push of their buttons, he began activating little servo motors underneath the sheet. He studied them as they pulled at the skin-like fabric, stretching its elasticity into preset configuartions - configurations such as "Happy" or "Sad" or "Angry".  
He didn't want angry robots, and he'd probably never allow them to be angry, but he still left that option in there, because without options, there could be no choice, and without choice, there was no life. It was unintuitive, yet scientific: Redundancy had a function. Without the option for evil, there could be no truly good people.

The face had no eyes yet. Where the visual sensors were supposed to go, there were just two gaping sockets. ...but it had the most basic of sensors built into it: A clock. It could sense the passage of time. In turn he had programmed a crude diagnostics program into it, that compared it against a hardwired time table of when the stores opened and closed. This allowed the program to demonstrate the most basic connection to reality.

Once he had connected the facial expressions to this connection, he would have established the first emotional response in the machine: A feeling about stores.

Some of his colleagues would argue, of course, that this wasn't "a real" display of intelligence or consciousness - that a rulebased AI was nothing more than an advanced program - but Wright didn't see anything special about the biological consciousness. To him it was just another advanced program. There was nothing really "hard" about it. It too had evolved from crude functions.


	2. Grammar

Dr. Light inserted the little EPROM into its socket, and slotted the circuit board into the bigger socket of the head casing. He didn't know just how many times he'd thought to himself "This should work.". If he was such a genius, then how come every time felt like a crapshoot?

"Welcome.", Roll said in a crude voice.

"Access quick routines.", Light said. "Add item."

"State name of item.", Roll inquired.

Light thought for a while. "Pear."

"Pear added. Indefinite article: A pear. Plural form: Peares."

"Not quite.", Light mumbled to himself. "...but close enough for now."

The English language wasn't something that could be deduced in a rational manner, like math. There were plenty of exceptions that had to be manually added to the knowledge base on a case-by-case basis. For children it took many years to build up even a fundamental vocabulary. He wish he could just plug in an online dictionary and instantly build the database that way.

"The store closes in one hours.", Roll informed him.

"Thank you. I don't know how I'd manage without you." Fixing the implementation of plurals, was probably his next task.


	3. 80s Nostalgia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Are we ever truly selfaware?

As he made his way to the store, Wright wandered through the strange scenery. Something was off with the world - a feeling so thick that he could taste it, and yet it evaded description. A thick sense of familiarity, suffocating in a bubble. An almost visible sense of static, hanging over his focus like a cobweb. A detachment from the self. A nostalgia over his present, as if it was just a present stored away somewhere - a dead recording of a life.  
Mega Man was released in 1987, on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and yet he had never met anybody named Mega Man. Wright felt like he himself, was just a character in a story too, captured in - and made out of - somebody else's lingering fantasies.  
There was a store - he was clearly heading there - but come to think of it, he couldn't picture the store manager. ...or describe the store. In this world, there was just him and his robots.  
...and it all made sense. There was just no need to question it. He was heading to the store, and he would get back from the store later, and everything would be fine. Time was frozen, yet it moved on. He chalked it all up to the mysteries of life.


	4. More Grammar and Different Zeroes

"The store closes in 5 hours and 32 minutes. (You'll make it.)", Roll answered him.  
"Okay. Good enough."  
He'd been toiling all day with her grammar, to the point where he SEEMED like he'd gotten it to work, but wouldn't bother testing everything properly. She'd no doubt surprise her with some glitch later on.

The plural phrasings were still a jury rigged system that wasn't integrated into the normal functions in the slightest, but such was the case with AI. It was like any building project: Until it was finished, it would always be in an unfinished state, supported by struts and TODO:s, waiting for improvements. The trick was to settle for imperfection in the present, and perfection later.

The worst part came when he started testing the time function with negative time values: Not only did he need some bizarre calculations for the carry, but he also found out that if he floor-divided a negative number and got 0, that was a 0 less than a NORMAL 0. It wasn't a NEGATIVE zero either, because a negative zero would still equal zero, which a floor divided negative zero did not. ...so there were somehow three zeroes, that he just gave up trying to sort out, and in the end just used a different value for.


	5. Chapter 5

"Bzzt!" The circuit board shot out a shower of sparks as Dr. Wright threw the on switch.  
"Oh dear!", Wright said to himself. He wiggled the smoking board out of its socket and turned it over in his hand. "I guess I was going a little overboard there, using a 7.20 mode on an old 6.99 chip. Oh well..." He tossed it over his shoulder, into the bin behind him. "That old mode wasn't doing us any good anyway."

There was about a hundred things that he could develop in Roll at this point. He could develop a reading skill, so that she could more easily access knowledge from things like books. He could develop her motor skills, so that she could begin to move about. ...but instead he'd chosen to work a bit on her access interface, and immediately gotten sidetracked when he discovered some obscure alternate display mode that he could activate. ...but whatever use the Japanese manufacturers had for it, it was proven useless to him.

Wright only chose to work on the most interesting parts. It was true that he'd have to develop the boring parts of Roll eventually, but the whole point of people, was how interesting they were to him. That's all that he wanted out of Roll: An interesting person, with an interesting past, so that they could both look back on her childhood with a sense of pride, instead of shame and resentment.

Out in the distance, somwehre up on a hill, the cheerful chirps of the sentry drone greeted the morning sun of a new day.


End file.
